On the Saturday in November 2020 when Joe Biden was declared president-elect, Cleveland businessman Bernie Moreno took to Twitter to congratulate Biden and his running mate and to urge his “conservative friends” to accept the results of the presidential election.
He wrote that there was probably some fraud and illegal votes cast, but concluded, “Was it anywhere near enough to change the result, no.”
But just over a year later, Moreno — now a candidate in Ohio’s Republican Senate primary — has deleted the tweets calling for unity and, in a new campaign ad, looks directly into the camera and declares, “President Trump says the election was stolen, and he’s right.”
“Just generally, the election was stolen,” Moreno said in an interview with The Washington Post. “There’s no question about that.”
Moreno is emblematic of the modern Republican Party, echoing former president Donald Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen — a position that has become the unofficial litmus test for good standing within the GOP.
As the nation prepares Thursday to mark the anniversary of the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Trump has pushed a majority of his party into a full embrace of his false election fraud charges, while simultaneously leading the ongoing efforts to whitewash the violence carried out that day by a pro-Trump mob.
At least 163 Republicans who have embraced Trump’s false claims are running for statewide positions that would give them authority over the administration of elections, according to a Post tally. The list includes 69 candidates for governor in 30 states, as well as 55 candidates for the U.S. Senate, 13 candidates for state attorney general and 18 candidates for secretary of state in places where that person is the state’s top election official.
At least five candidates for the U.S. House were at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 riots, including Jason Riddle of New Hampshire, whom federal prosecutors have accused of chugging wine inside the building that day.
Trump’s continued false claims of 2020 nationwide voter fraud
At a rally on Oct. 9 in Des Moines, former president Donald Trump continued to unleash a litany of false and unproven claims of voter fraud in 2020. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)
Trump is “absolutely” the most influential figure in the party, Riddle said in an interview, but he doesn’t expect an endorsement from Trump because it would be too controversial. “He wants some distance from the rioters,” he said, adding: “I’d love it if he ran again.”
Riddle added that if he’s sentenced for Jan. 6 crimes, “I’ll run from jail. It will give me something to do.”
And of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump last January for inciting an insurrection, each has received at least one primary challenger. Rep. Tom Rice (S.C.), for example, faces at least 10 primary opponents in his reelection bid and was censured by his own state party, which also did not invite him to a major Republican conference in his hometown of Myrtle Beach.
Supporters of President Donald Trump storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post)
Others, like Reps. Anthony Gonzalez (Ohio) and Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), have since announced they don’t plan to seek reelection. Another Trump critic, Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), was ousted from her leadership post and replaced by a Trump loyalist; she is now vice chair of the House select committee examining the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Daniel Ziblatt, a professor at Harvard University and the co-author of “How Democracies Die,” said that many Americans expected Jan. 6 to “be a breaking point, where Republicans would finally have an excuse to separate themselves from Trumpism.”
“But, in fact, what we’ve seen is very much the opposite, in which a lot Republican politicians have begun to think it is in their interest electorally to support the lie,” Ziblatt said.
Another striking illustration of the Republican Party’s evolution can be seen in its “Young Guns” program, which identifies candidates in competitive House districts who have shown they can raise money and whose campaign messages sync with the party’s views. One of the group’s early poster children, back in 2010, was Kinzinger.
Now, of the 32 candidates identified so far by the “Young Guns” program as having promise in the 2022 cycle, at least 12 have embraced the new Republican orthodoxy that fraud tainted the 2020 election. One of them, former Navy SEAL Eli Crane of Arizona, used Twitter to call on his state legislature to decertify the election and demand a criminal investigation.
Another candidate identified by the program, Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, embraced a fantastical and discredited theory that machines made by Dominion Voting Systems were programmed to switch votes from Trump to Biden. Luna met with Trump in 2021 and has been endorsed by Trump as a “warrior” and a “winner.”
The National Republican Congressional Committee, which runs the program, has fundraised extensively off Trump while highlighting and recruiting candidates who have claimed the election was stolen. Yet its chairman, Rep. Tom Emmer (Minn.), was among the minority of House Republicans who voted to certify the 2020 election results and has repeatedly encouraged Trump to move on from the topic in his public appearances.
“Candidates know the issues most important to their voters. Right now the midterms are going to be a referendum on Democrats’ rank incompetence that’s led to skyrocketing prices, rising crime and a crisis along the southern border,” said NRCC spokesman Michael McAdams, when asked whether Republican candidates still should be talking about the 2020 election.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) speaks to reporters during a meeting with the members of the House select committee on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Capitol Hill on July 26. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Nonetheless, Trump has spent much of his post-presidency marinating in false voting claims and electoral conspiracy theories. He has pushed Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, and other Republican officials to claim on television that the election was stolen, and repeatedly pressed the topic with Sen. Rick Scott (Fla.), the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, according to Republicans familiar with the conversations.
The RNC is launching a range of new initiatives related to elections, including plans for filing lawsuits in states, hiring more elections-related officials and recruiting more volunteers, said Justin Riemer, the RNC’s chief counsel. The aim is to stanch some of Trump’s criticism while not endorsing his most incendiary and false rhetoric, party officials and strategists say.
“There is always going to be pressure on the RNC to try to do more than it has,” Riemer said in a recent interview.
NRSC spokesman Chris Hartline said the committee is focused more on efforts to change election rules in the future than a relitigation of 2020. “Our position is that there is a way to talk about this that is politically advantageous and actually charts a path forward,” Hartline said.
In interviews with Republican candidates seeking his endorsement, Trump almost always brings up the question of election fraud, though he does not base his final decision solely on that topic, two advisers said. The former president regularly calls political allies in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania — three of the five states that flipped to Biden in 2020 — to rail about the election results, one of the advisers added, and receives updates on what state lawmakers are doing to combat election fraud from Liz Harrington, his “Stop the Steal” promoter and spokeswoman.
Trump has been frustrated that some in the GOP, particularly prominent Republicans in the Senate, have not been willing to echo his claims — and that an overwhelming majority of the body voted to certify the election.
“Americans must have confidence in the voting process — a confidence that was destroyed by Democrats during the 2020 Election,” Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich said in a statement. “ . . . Voters demand it and Republicans across the nation are following President Trump’s lead to restore election integrity.”
According to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll in December, 58 percent of Republicans think Biden’s election was not legitimate, and 62 percent think there is solid evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.
Moreno, for his part, says that as he has learned more about the 2020 election, his thinking has evolved from those early tweets endorsing the outcome. He cited mainstream media and big technology companies colluding against Trump, states that changed election laws and what he views as the possibility that Trump’s claims of massive fraud are legitimate.
Moreno said “the door was flung open” to fraud and abuse during 2020 and he, like Trump, is still trying to answer one key question: “How much actual fraud was there?”
“That doesn’t mean that the results are overturned,” Moreno said. “What it does mean is that we need to learn and say, ‘Wow. What happened? And how do we make certain that something like this never, ever happens again?’ ”
More at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...f4cad4-6cb6-11ec-974b-d1c6de8b26b0_story.html
He wrote that there was probably some fraud and illegal votes cast, but concluded, “Was it anywhere near enough to change the result, no.”
But just over a year later, Moreno — now a candidate in Ohio’s Republican Senate primary — has deleted the tweets calling for unity and, in a new campaign ad, looks directly into the camera and declares, “President Trump says the election was stolen, and he’s right.”
“Just generally, the election was stolen,” Moreno said in an interview with The Washington Post. “There’s no question about that.”
Moreno is emblematic of the modern Republican Party, echoing former president Donald Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen — a position that has become the unofficial litmus test for good standing within the GOP.
As the nation prepares Thursday to mark the anniversary of the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Trump has pushed a majority of his party into a full embrace of his false election fraud charges, while simultaneously leading the ongoing efforts to whitewash the violence carried out that day by a pro-Trump mob.
At least 163 Republicans who have embraced Trump’s false claims are running for statewide positions that would give them authority over the administration of elections, according to a Post tally. The list includes 69 candidates for governor in 30 states, as well as 55 candidates for the U.S. Senate, 13 candidates for state attorney general and 18 candidates for secretary of state in places where that person is the state’s top election official.
At least five candidates for the U.S. House were at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 riots, including Jason Riddle of New Hampshire, whom federal prosecutors have accused of chugging wine inside the building that day.
Trump’s continued false claims of 2020 nationwide voter fraud
At a rally on Oct. 9 in Des Moines, former president Donald Trump continued to unleash a litany of false and unproven claims of voter fraud in 2020. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)
Trump is “absolutely” the most influential figure in the party, Riddle said in an interview, but he doesn’t expect an endorsement from Trump because it would be too controversial. “He wants some distance from the rioters,” he said, adding: “I’d love it if he ran again.”
Riddle added that if he’s sentenced for Jan. 6 crimes, “I’ll run from jail. It will give me something to do.”
And of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump last January for inciting an insurrection, each has received at least one primary challenger. Rep. Tom Rice (S.C.), for example, faces at least 10 primary opponents in his reelection bid and was censured by his own state party, which also did not invite him to a major Republican conference in his hometown of Myrtle Beach.
Supporters of President Donald Trump storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post)
Others, like Reps. Anthony Gonzalez (Ohio) and Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), have since announced they don’t plan to seek reelection. Another Trump critic, Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), was ousted from her leadership post and replaced by a Trump loyalist; she is now vice chair of the House select committee examining the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Daniel Ziblatt, a professor at Harvard University and the co-author of “How Democracies Die,” said that many Americans expected Jan. 6 to “be a breaking point, where Republicans would finally have an excuse to separate themselves from Trumpism.”
“But, in fact, what we’ve seen is very much the opposite, in which a lot Republican politicians have begun to think it is in their interest electorally to support the lie,” Ziblatt said.
Another striking illustration of the Republican Party’s evolution can be seen in its “Young Guns” program, which identifies candidates in competitive House districts who have shown they can raise money and whose campaign messages sync with the party’s views. One of the group’s early poster children, back in 2010, was Kinzinger.
Now, of the 32 candidates identified so far by the “Young Guns” program as having promise in the 2022 cycle, at least 12 have embraced the new Republican orthodoxy that fraud tainted the 2020 election. One of them, former Navy SEAL Eli Crane of Arizona, used Twitter to call on his state legislature to decertify the election and demand a criminal investigation.
Another candidate identified by the program, Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, embraced a fantastical and discredited theory that machines made by Dominion Voting Systems were programmed to switch votes from Trump to Biden. Luna met with Trump in 2021 and has been endorsed by Trump as a “warrior” and a “winner.”
The National Republican Congressional Committee, which runs the program, has fundraised extensively off Trump while highlighting and recruiting candidates who have claimed the election was stolen. Yet its chairman, Rep. Tom Emmer (Minn.), was among the minority of House Republicans who voted to certify the 2020 election results and has repeatedly encouraged Trump to move on from the topic in his public appearances.
“Candidates know the issues most important to their voters. Right now the midterms are going to be a referendum on Democrats’ rank incompetence that’s led to skyrocketing prices, rising crime and a crisis along the southern border,” said NRCC spokesman Michael McAdams, when asked whether Republican candidates still should be talking about the 2020 election.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) speaks to reporters during a meeting with the members of the House select committee on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Capitol Hill on July 26. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Nonetheless, Trump has spent much of his post-presidency marinating in false voting claims and electoral conspiracy theories. He has pushed Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, and other Republican officials to claim on television that the election was stolen, and repeatedly pressed the topic with Sen. Rick Scott (Fla.), the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, according to Republicans familiar with the conversations.
The RNC is launching a range of new initiatives related to elections, including plans for filing lawsuits in states, hiring more elections-related officials and recruiting more volunteers, said Justin Riemer, the RNC’s chief counsel. The aim is to stanch some of Trump’s criticism while not endorsing his most incendiary and false rhetoric, party officials and strategists say.
“There is always going to be pressure on the RNC to try to do more than it has,” Riemer said in a recent interview.
NRSC spokesman Chris Hartline said the committee is focused more on efforts to change election rules in the future than a relitigation of 2020. “Our position is that there is a way to talk about this that is politically advantageous and actually charts a path forward,” Hartline said.
In interviews with Republican candidates seeking his endorsement, Trump almost always brings up the question of election fraud, though he does not base his final decision solely on that topic, two advisers said. The former president regularly calls political allies in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania — three of the five states that flipped to Biden in 2020 — to rail about the election results, one of the advisers added, and receives updates on what state lawmakers are doing to combat election fraud from Liz Harrington, his “Stop the Steal” promoter and spokeswoman.
Trump has been frustrated that some in the GOP, particularly prominent Republicans in the Senate, have not been willing to echo his claims — and that an overwhelming majority of the body voted to certify the election.
“Americans must have confidence in the voting process — a confidence that was destroyed by Democrats during the 2020 Election,” Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich said in a statement. “ . . . Voters demand it and Republicans across the nation are following President Trump’s lead to restore election integrity.”
According to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll in December, 58 percent of Republicans think Biden’s election was not legitimate, and 62 percent think there is solid evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.
Moreno, for his part, says that as he has learned more about the 2020 election, his thinking has evolved from those early tweets endorsing the outcome. He cited mainstream media and big technology companies colluding against Trump, states that changed election laws and what he views as the possibility that Trump’s claims of massive fraud are legitimate.
Moreno said “the door was flung open” to fraud and abuse during 2020 and he, like Trump, is still trying to answer one key question: “How much actual fraud was there?”
“That doesn’t mean that the results are overturned,” Moreno said. “What it does mean is that we need to learn and say, ‘Wow. What happened? And how do we make certain that something like this never, ever happens again?’ ”
More at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...f4cad4-6cb6-11ec-974b-d1c6de8b26b0_story.html
